Eastern Rectangle

Some of the metals that make up the Isthmus, which joins the Western and Eastern Rectangles. 

There are a few places where this trend in altitude will trip a careless walker. Here and there—in the Eastern Rectangle, between tellurium and iodine, and in the Isthmus, between copper and nickel—a dreaming foot will trip, because here the land falls away very slightly instead of rising. These tiny faults in the landscape clearly need... 

Broadly speaking, the landscape of diameters rises from north to south and falls from west to east, but there are many exceptions. It is rather contrary to intuition, at first sight, that as atoms get heavier from northwest to southeast they also get smaller. A particularly important instance of this apparently bizarre trend is from west to east across the Isthmus, where the land sinks as we travel east and then climbs again into the Eastern Rectangle, where the fall resumes. Something is clearly at work in the... 

There are six columns in the Eastern Rectangle. There are three 2p-orbitals, each one of which can accommodate two electrons. As we trek east, from boron to carbon to nitrogen to oxygen to fluorine, we drop one more electron into the three 2p-orbitals, and then we arrive at neon. Here we add the sixth p-electron, so the ground-state structure of this atom is [He]2s22p6. Now the 2p-orbitals are full,... 

In general, molecular compounds are the soft face of nature, and ionic compounds are the hard. Few distinctions make this clearer than those between the soft face of the Earth—its rivers, its air, its grass, its forests, all of which are molecular—and the harsh substructures of the landscape, which are largely ionic. This is why the upper triangle of the Eastern Rectangle is so important to the existence of life, and why all the rest of the kingdom is so important in the formation of a stable, solid platform. 

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